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DM 5

When direct marketing godfather

Lester Wunderman visited Africa

in the early 1970s, little did he

know that he would return with a

firmer philosophical foundation for the glob-

al advertising company that bears his name.

Wunderman is an innovator of direct mar-

keting firsts, including the 800 number, loyal-

ty awards and blow-in magazine subscription

cards. The now legendary figure, who cele-

brated his 90th birthday in June but dutiful-

ly and joyfully comes to work every day, is

chairman emeritus and spiritual leader of

Wunderman, which is committed to cus-

tomer-focused relationship marketing.

During that African trip, which included a

stop in Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire and an

extended stay with the Dogon ethnic group in

Mali, Wunderman’s experiences proved to be

seminal to his advertising vision.

The story goes like this: In Abidjan, he went

to dinner with several other foreigners at a

nightclub where the entertainment included

dancers and drummers. After the featured

performance, Wunderman wanted to dance to

the West African beat but found no takers at

his table. Against the advice of his shocked

host, he decided to invite, in a very metaphor-

ic way, one of the artists, a young woman with

red shoes, to dance with him.

Wunderman gently approached the

woman and gave her his own shoes. She

showed them to the entire house, including a

circle of derisive men on the perimeter of the

space, who he says “were just waiting for me

to do something stupid.”

She asked why he wanted to join her on

the floor, and he replied, “My shoes want to

dance, but since you are not permitted to

dance with me, I would like you to dance with

my shoes.” She announced the request to the

crowd, who laughed. Tensions eased.

Then the dancer, playing along with the

game, ceremoniously presented him with her

tiny red shoes. In his autobiography, Being

Direct: Making Advertising Pay, Wunderman

wrote: “It was as if everyone now understood

the will of the shoes.” His feet could not fit

into her slippers, so he suggested that they

each dance in their own shoes. The crowd

agreed with humorous approval.

RISK AND REWARDThis month, sitting in his midtown Manhattan

office adorned with colorful, framed comput-

erized art, Wunderman smiles and reveals

the secret behind his success as an advertis-

ing maverick: “It was a risk, which is the way

DrivingresponseLester Wunderman, the guru of directmarketing, reflects on risk, advertisingand making relationships count

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Aug. 30 - Sept. 6, 2010

DOCUMENT: AMEX_Lester Wunderman Ad_vFIN_08242010.inddBLEED W: 8.625" H: 11.125" TRIM W: 8.375" H: 10.875" SAFETY W: 7.875" H: 10.25"

American Express extends its deepest thanks

to Lester Wunderman for his many years of partnership,

pioneering spirit and unending drive for innovation.

“If there is a lesson to be learned, I believe it is to

not do anything half-heartedly. If you’re going to do it at all,

give it all that you have to give.” — L ester Wu nder ma n

© 2

010

Amer

ican

Exp

ress

Com

pany

.

it’s happened all my life. I take chances when

the opportunity arises, hoping for something

wonderful to happen.”

He adds, “Doing this game with the shoes

and being able to dance with that girl helped

me to pass into the culture.”

On the same African trip, Wunderman vis-

ited the Dogon people, whose wood sculp-

tures he had begun to collect (his 61-piece

collection is now housed at New York’s

Metropolitan Museum of Art). He became

close friends with Chief Ogorbara Dolo.

“We became pals,” Wunderman says. “We

would take walks, sit on rocks on this cave-

like hillside and talk philosophically to each

other as men. I was trying to understand his

culture, and he was trying to understand

mine. We found some kind of connection,

and he made me his brother—the only white

brother he ever had. Being a brother, I was

able to eat dinner in his hut.”

A few years later, Wunderman

had remarried and returned to

Mali with his new wife. The

group honored him with a

three-day celebration, with

Ogorbara serving as best man.

According to custom, they sacri-

ficed a lamb and 14 chickens on

a rooftop, which Wunderman

was required to witness sans his

wife.

He laughs when recounting

the event: “What I didn’t know

was that as part of their tradi-

tion, they cut the throat of a

chicken and threw it at you—as

guest of honor. It was my

(Malian) wedding day, so I came

dressed in a white shirt, white

trousers and a pair of white

Gucci shoes. Suddenly I was cov-

ered in blood as all 14 chickens

were thrown at me. My wife was

down below hearing all these

sounds, so I wanted to reassure

her that I was OK. I leaned over

the roof. She saw me and

screamed. But I told her that

everything was all right, that I was being cele-

brated.”

When asked how these African experi-

ences were incorporated into his work,

Wunderman says, “I got a true sense of rela-

tionship and how that is different from hav-

ing an encounter. A relationship between

two people or a person and a group includes

acceptance—if not love, then certainly a kind

of affection and respect.

“What I found was that dialogues that

ensue from such a relationship are different.

Here, we meet someone and ask them what

they do. Oh, I’m in advertising. What about

you? I’m on Wall Street. You get the facts,

but you don’t enter the person. You just

bounce off the shell of a person because we

protect ourselves with our shells. Not many

of us are open to relationships. What we’re

trying to do with this agency is create rela-

tionships between our clients and their

customers.”

Advertisers, Wunderman says, may have

encounters—consumers seeing a product on

a shelf, paying attention to an advertise-

ment, maybe even making a purchase—but

deeper relationships make for real cus-

tomers. At other agencies, he says, “adver-

tising is about making the product known

and somewhat desired by the prospective

customer. But the focus is on the product

itself and not the consumer.”

It’s that fundamental shift in perspective

that factors in today’s social-networking

world, especially with the plethora of infor-

mation available, which “we try to use to cre-

ate some kind of deeper knowledge between

each other. That’s what I learned in Africa. A

relationship is not an encounter. It’s about

being humanly exposed.”

FEAR OF RUTSWunderman has never shied away from cre-

atively seeking answers to problems. “I’ve

always had the audacity to try new things,”

he says. “As a matter of fact, what I’m most

afraid of is convention. If anything, I’m afraid

of being stuck in the ruts of the old vehicles

that have passed over the road.”

At the age of 19, Wunderman started out

in the ad world (“We were kids; we were

innocent; we were naive”), forming his own

mail-order agency with his older brother,

Irving.

It wasn’t his original vision. He had wanted

to be a creative writer. After his father died

when he was 9, his uncle took him under his

wing. “He was a storyteller and a story

writer,” says Wunderman, recalling how his

uncle would take him to lunch with his

friends, who were also writers.

His first job? Delivering chickens for a

kosher butcher. “There was no romance at

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Wunderman’s highly successful Columbia House record clubcampaign was ubiquitous in the 1970s.

Wordsfrom WundermanYou can’t assault a consumer, which is what a lot ofadvertisers do. The fact is advertising speaks in aloud voice. We in advertising know that we have tobe heard. But persuasion sometimes is betterexpressed in a whisper than it is with a shout.

Wordsfrom WundermanWe’re not trying to scare the consumer.We’re trying to make friends.

DM 7

aw_direct_Wunderman_aug10 8/25/10 2:02 PM Page 7

the beginning of my working career, but

there was plenty of romance in my head. So

I tried to figure out what I could do to satis-

fy those creative impulses.”

Even though the first Wunderman agency

(Coronet Advertising Service) failed, he

gained valuable insight: “We learned how to

innovate, to learn the mastery of the tools of

communication. That’s what we still do at

the agency today. We’re better masters of

communication than most other agencies,

and for that reason, we serve our clients

with more dimension than others can. It’s

part of our vision.”

The Wunderman brothers, along with Ed

Ricotta and Harry Kline, left the mail-order

agency Maxwell Sackheim & Co., Inc., in

1958. They formed Wunderman, Ricotta &

Kline, which explored a wider range of direct

marketing endeavors, attracting more than

$2 million in billings during its first year. It

grew to 17 clients in the second year. Ten

years later, it expanded internationally, first

to Canada, then to London and Paris.

Wunderman’s agency merged with Young

& Rubicam in 1973 and since 2000 has been

a part of the WPP Group. High-profile clients

include Kraft, Ford, Microsoft, Citibank and

American Express, among many others, past

and present. Today, the Wunderman network

employs more than 6,000 people in more

than 40 countries and billings are nearing $1

billion.

COINING THE PHRASEIn 1961, Wunderman spoke to the Hundred

Million Club of New York, an organization

of direct-mail business leaders, about how

direct marketing represented a new fron-

tier. More famously, in 1967, he made a

speech to the American Advertising

Association at MIT in Boston. It was titled

“Direct Marketing—The New Revolution in

Selling,” and his concept of direct marketing

immediately supplanted the second-class

mail-order advertising model. It also cata-

pulted Wunderman into the position of

spokesperson, purveyor and innovator in

direct marketing.

“I changed the language,” he says proudly.

“I invented the term direct marketing.”

In his best-seller The Tipping Point,

Malcolm Gladwell applauds Wunderman for

his innovation in hanging on to the Columbia

Record Club account—the world’s largest.

Writing in The New Yorker in 1998, he sin-

gles Wunderman out as the father of con-

temporary persuasion and the pioneer of

modern-day marketing, complete with com-

puter databases and psychographic profiles.

Harold Burson, co-founder of the largest

PR agency in the world, Burson-Marsteller,

heralds Wunderman for “popularizing a very

significant form of advertising that produces

results… He not only has been the greatest

practitioner in the field of direct marketing,

but he is also the greatest student of direct

marketing.”

Former Y&R CEO Ed Ney introduced the

pair to each other, and the three have

remained close. (Burson jokingly calls the

trio of pals “the wizards that was.”)

Noting that Wunderman’s advantage has

been coming up with highly creative solu-

tions to meet his client’s objectives, Burson

says, “Targeting an audience is a very com-

plicated field, even now with the Internet.

But Lester has that ability to know the soft

spots of direct marketing. And he’s global-

ized it. His agency has been able to walk the

fine line of delivering the central mes-

sage of a client, tweaking it and adapting

it depending on the language. They take

the core idea and mold it to different

cultures.”

That global perspective has factored

highly with Microsoft, which uses

Wunderman as its AOR for direct market-

ing worldwide. “Wunderman has been a ter-

rific partner for us, bringing us a global van-

tage point to problem solving,” says Gayle

Troberman, chief creative officer, Microsoft.

“They’re good throughout the world for cre-

ating individual partnerships at a local level

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Contemporary technology and future technologyare erasing the things that used to happen whenpeople huddled in their houses and no one knewwhat they were doing except when they went out toshop. The world is so much more open. With theInternet today, it’s so easy to find out what peopledo and what they want.

‘Wunderman has been a terrific partnerfor us, bringing us aglobal vantage pointto problem solving.’— Gayle Troberman,

chief creative officer, Microsoft

Wunderman at his 90th birthday party.

Wordsfrom Wunderman

DM 8

aw_direct_Wunderman_aug10 8/25/10 2:02 PM Page 8

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with business-to-business. They help us

localize and translate, driving relevance to

our core message.”

She cites as an example Microsoft’s “It’s

everybody’s business” campaign about the

power of the company’s software for busi-

nesses. “Wunderman’s field marketers have

done tremendous work, pushing and pulling

our core content into all the spaces to

extend the campaign through direct

response and scaling into events.”

Troberman adds that the Wunderman

brand has been true to its founder’s vision.

“The team there is passionate about our

product, proactively coming up with ideas

when they see opportunities to conduct a

marketing initiative. That’s important for us

because they bring a worldwide perspective

that’s much greater than Redmond.”

LLEEAADDEERRSSHHIIPP AANNDD RREESSPPEECCTTAs chairman emeritus, Wunderman no

longer monitors the day-to-day pulse of his

agency’s clientele. He leaves that to CEO,

chairman Daniel Morel and COO, vice chair-

man David Sable, who have both served the

agency in their positions since 2000.

“They’re both extraordinary,” says

Wunderman. “Daniel is brilliant. He’s a

genius. He’s opened up the world to us and

more than doubled the size of the agency.

He knows what to acquire and when to

acquire. And he knows the direct marketing

business. Daniel does a lot of things I didn’t

do, though I did start to spread the agency

internationally. But he’s so much better at

this than I ever was. He’s a great leader. I was

a practitioner. When a business gets to be

this size, it needs a CEO who’s not necessar-

ily a practitioner.”

Morel credits the agency’s success to its

founder. “It’s Lester’s heritage at work here,”

he says. “We’ve grown by following his lead.

Our market expansion has followed the

clients. We’ve acquired companies all around

the world to better serve our clients.”

Acquisitions include digital companies

such as Boston analytics company

Fortelligent in 2005, Seattle-based data

interactive company ZAAZ in 2006, and

Seoul-based marketing services companies

ComHAUS Korea Ltd. and SRP Corporation

Ltd. in the same year. In 2007, Wunderman

acquired digital shops These Days (Belgium),

Aqua Online (South Africa) and Blast Radius

(Canada); Paris-based Kassius in 2008; and

Moscow-based Actis Systems in 2009,

among others.

Morel’s philosophy: Since the future is dig-

ital, Wunderman acquires companies with

digital expertise. “With the roster of our net-

work, we have an army of specialists,” he

says. “We’re not a homogenized company.

We have much more depth.” He notes that

65 percent of Wunderman revenue today is

purely digital, with less than 5 percent

derived from its original direct-mail base.

Morel sees the next step in the rapidly

changing digital landscape to be the enter-

tainment value and content development on

Web platforms. As this develops, Morel says,

“We want to be present. When entertain-

ment is in such demand there, advertising

dollars will follow. This is a very exciting time

for us.”

As for David Sable, Wunderman says,

“David is me, reincarnate. He does all the

things I did. He’s creative and a marketer.”

Sable in turn holds up Wunderman as a

man who foresaw the changes in direct mar-

keting. “With all due respect to Al Gore,

Lester predicted the Internet when he gave

his MIT speech in 1967,” he says. “People

read it, and they assume it’s his latest

speech.”

He says that because of Wunderman’s

personal charisma and wisdom, the agency

will continue to lead in digital and data.

“Lester is very much the living icon of the

business,” Sable says. “He’s the driver of our

culture. He’s revered. We owe so much to

Lester, which is why we carry his name into

the future.”

Morel and Sable agree that Wunderman’s

presence in the office every day is a

reminder of his values and goals. “Lester is

at the center,” says Morel. “His name is on

the door. He may not be involved in the

minutiae of the day to day, but he’s a great

resource when we’re trying to get a perspec-

tive on a client. He gives us meaty and sub-

stantial advice. We follow his principles; we

work in the spirit of Lester. His name is the

summary of our purpose and morality when

it comes to advertising.”

In his office, Wunderman still feels quite at

home. “I still use my imagination and cre-

ativity, and I feel good about it,” he says. “I

think the agency feels good about me. I’ve

become the face of the agency in a way,

which is good because I have a broader view

of advertising than most people.”

Pausing, he searches for the right word to

describe his role. “I’m the ambassador,” he

says, then overrules himself: “No, I’m the

guru.” ■

From left: David Sable, vice chairman and COO, Wunderman Worldwide; Harold Burson, founding chair-man, Burson-Marsteller; Lester Wunderman, chairman emeritus and founder, Wunderman; Ed Ney, chair-man emeritus, Young & Rubicam; and Daniel Morel, chairman and CEO, Wunderman.

Wordsfrom WundermanIf we know what people want, we can try to give itto them. The other thing is that we don’t have towaste messages on people who are ineligible orincapable of buying our client’s products. So rele-vance is a key word for tomorrow.

DM 9

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AdWeek, Brand Week, Media Week

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FONTS: Interstate-Bold (Regular; True Type)Interstate (Light; Type 1)Times (Roman; Type 1) LINKS: Lester.5.tifcitibank_logo_CMYK_Blue.eps

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Only an advertising legend receives a “happy birthday”full-page ad.

Citi wishes Lester Wunderman, the “father of direct marketing,” a very happy 90th.

And a sincere thank you for all your years of creating great, award–winning Citi work.

© 2010 Citigroup Inc. Citibank N.A. Member FDIC. Citi, Citibank and Citibank with Arc Design are registered service marks of Citigroup Inc.